By the time June ends, half your marketing year is already spent. The plans you made in January have met reality: some channels are carrying the load, a few are quietly leaking budget, and at least one assumption has turned out to be wrong. A mid-year marketing audit is how you catch that before the second half compounds it.
Here are the seven checks we run for our own clients at the halfway mark. None of them take long. All of them tend to find money.
1. Reconcile spend against the plan
Pull actual spend by channel for the first half and put it next to what you budgeted in January. The gaps are the story. Channels that quietly grew past their allocation need to justify it with results, and the ones that came in under are either efficient or neglected. You cannot reallocate what you have not measured.
2. Re-rank channels by cost per outcome, not cost per click
Sort every channel by the cost of the outcome that pays you: a booked call, a qualified lead, a sale. Clicks and impressions flatter the channels that are cheapest to buy, not the ones that earn. The channel with the ugliest click cost is often the one with the best cost per customer.
3. Audit your conversion tracking before you trust any of it
Every reallocation decision rests on your conversion data, so spend ten minutes confirming it is real. Check that events fire once and not three times, that offline conversions are flowing back in, and that lead quality, not just lead count, is being recorded. Bad data does not just mislead you. It trains your bidding algorithms to chase the wrong thing.
4. Check your share of AI answers
Search did not stay still while you were busy. Ask the questions your buyers ask inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, and see whether you are named. If your competitors are being cited and you are not, that is a gap that will widen every month you ignore it, and it does not show up in your rankings report.
5. Find the wasted spend hiding in plain sight
Two places hide most of it: search terms you never meant to pay for, and audiences that click but never convert. Pull the search term report, add the negatives, and look at performance by device, placement, and time of day. The cuts here usually fund the experiments in the second half.
6. Pressure-test the page after the click
Most budgets do not die in the ad account. They die on a slow, off-message landing page. Load your top three landing pages on a phone, time them, and read them as a stranger would. If the page does not load fast and match the promise of the ad, more traffic will only lose you more money.
7. Rewrite the second-half plan in one page
Close the audit by writing next quarter on a single page: what you are doubling down on, what you are cutting, and the one or two bets you are funding with the savings. If it does not fit on a page, it is a wish list, not a plan.
The point of a mid-year marketing audit
You do not need a new strategy in June. You need an honest look at the one you already have, so the second half is spent on what is working instead of what you hoped would work. Run these seven checks, move the money, and let the back half of the year carry the front half.
